When It's All Crashing Down
by MYZ-chan
Summary: -JasderoLenalee- It is a bleak world out there, but they will endure, for they are the only ones they have left. -semi-AU-


Word Count: 1,541

This was originally meant to be a DavidLenalee story, but then I realized how little attention I was paying to Jasdero and a possible future!Jasdero. So I made this about him and Lenalee. This would cause many happy 'hoorays' in the background, I suppose.

Like all my other one-shots and drabbles, I love it and I hate it. I know that some parts are odd and some are sweet, and I love and hate them all as much as you do (though possibly less).

(By the way, this is way in the future. The two of them are very changed, including Jasdero. I know that. I also know that David isn't his brother, but to make things easier on myself and my writing, I made him his brother anyways. Don't complain.)

NO FLAMINGS ABOUT THE PAIRINGS/CHARACTERS/FANDOM/CHOICE OF WRITING WILL BE TOLERATED. GO EXPRESS YOUR ANGER ELSEWHERE OR ADVISE ME NICELY.

Try to enjoy!

* * *

_Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life._

-Bertolt Brecht

_Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for._

-Dag Hammarskjold

* * *

It's a pulsing at the back of her head, the knowing of the end.

She sits by the window, the shattered window with the broken glass sprinkled on the ground. She can hear the sound of rain, feel it on her hair, her lips, her pale, pale hands. She can feel the heavy air filled with death around her.

In the distance, she sees a monster rise from the depths of smoke and rubble and roar, roar like it ruled the world.

It did.

Her lips twitch into a bitter smile. They won. The devil won.

The world is ending, slowing on its axis, and she can do nothing to stop it.

---

Sometimes, if she's observant and not too tired, she can hear the sound of footsteps inside the remains of the Order. She doesn't know who is there, and, frankly, she doesn't care. If the person is there to kill the last exorcist, they are too late.

She is already dead on the inside.

She closes her eyes, feels the thin flesh cover her sight. It's odd. It seems that she feels more than she sees these days.

---

When she opens her eyes, the first thing she usually sees is the rotting corpse of Kanda, strewn across the floor with his bone showing through his skin.

Sometimes if she's feeling particularly masochistic, she continues to look around to see Lavi and Allen, strung up by their necks and hands and goodness knows what else.

Then she feels pain, an emotion she knows too well, and she shuts her eyes again and listens to the screams in the distance and the footsteps downstairs grow fainter and fainter until she falls asleep again.

---

Sometimes, when she actually opens her eyes and looks past the corpses of her comrades, she can see a flash of golden hair and eyes, a glimpse of gray skin and dirty, black fingers in the doorway, feels the presence of warmth from a human being.

One time when she sits up, she sees the figure standing there next to the remains of the old staircase.

It's watching her.

She doesn't remember how to feel frightened anymore, so she smiles with a twitch of her lips and calls out softly, "Are you lonely, too?"

She blinks and then it is gone.

---

It comes back.

She opens her eyes and sees it standing closer than it did before. She can see the golden eyes watching her, rimmed with gray eyelids and sadness. She feels the emptiness from it all (feeling everything around her is painful sometimes, but she's used to it).

They look at each other for a while, silently, carefully, before it says:

"Yes."

---

He usually stands away from her for the next few months, watching and talking. He tells her about how in the war between the exorcists and the Noah he lost the use of his arm and his eye, how he lost his elder brother to the Innocence.

"It was an exorcist," he says softly. She watches him unconsciously trace the branded words on his limb, watches the soft, undefined features of his face twist in pain. "He gave it to us, the Innocence, and my brother's body rejected it. He died a few hours later." He looks down at his bare feet. "I didn't. Sometimes I wish I did."

"I lost my brother too," she says as softly as him. She gazes back out the window. "He died from the Akuma attack a few years ago."

"I'm sorry."

She looks at him. He means it.

"Don't be."

---

He sits by her now at the window, watching the bloodshed and fighting with her.

"How can you stand to look at this?" he asks.

She looks back outside, sees the monster rear up and destroy another human. Before, she would have felt some pain at the death. Now, she doesn't remember how to even cry. "I don't know."

He looks back at her, stares before touching her hand. A million nerves go off. Thousands of lightning bolts zap into her heart. She looks at him sharply, shocked, because for just a moment, she had felt alive.

"You shouldn't look."

She doesn't.

---

For a moment, they sit there together in the light, silent. She looks at him, and for the longest time, says nothing.

Then she speaks.

"You're a Noah, aren't you?"

He starts guiltily before looking down at the shattered glass below underneath the window. "Yes."

She continues to look at him, his golden hair, his broken, gray arm and non-seeing eye. "You're Jasdero."

There's a long pause before he replies. "Yes."

She smiles (for real this time) and he looks up at her, eyes glancing over her curved up mouth. "I couldn't recognize you because of all the missing stitches."

He laughs a little bit (it's kind of like a light here, a light in her darkened world). "I got rid of those a while ago."

"Wouldn't you get in trouble with the Earl if he finds out you've been spending time with me?"

He picks a little bit at the waistband of his jeans. "He doesn't need to find out what I've been doing."

She doesn't talk for a long time before she speaks again, "I thought you were dead."

His gaze hardens and twists. She can feel the old pain resurfacing from him, feels the sadness that had been vanishing from his presence return. "I am on the inside."

---

He doesn't come back for a while after that. She spends most of her time by the window, eating some of the apples that manage to grow during the spring (is it spring already? She wonders to herself).

The only reason that she's living now is so that she can wait for him to come back.

---

She can't remember how long it's been since he's been gone, and she doesn't want to remember. It hurts too much.

She looks at all the flowers blossoming on the trees, budding and falling and living.

Life goes on, doesn't it? She asks herself. Or does it stay in one place before you find your purpose again?

---

It's when she's in a fitful sleep she hears him sit next to her on the windowsill. She feels, with an electric current running through her veins, his fingers brushing against her knuckles.

"I know you're asleep," she hears him say. Another electric current runs through her veins, makes her twitch. He takes no notice. "I know that you can't hear me right now, but I just wanted to say that I'm sorry. For everything that I've done and did to you. For making you wait, I'm sorry." She feels him move his body so that he's facing her, feels him move closer so that he's almost against her. "I wanted to say that to you, but I don't even know your name."

He laughs. "I don't remember what your friends called you back then, but I remember calling you 'princess'." She feels his eyes scrutinize her. "I guess it fits you, a little."

He's silent for a little while longer. She doesn't dare open her eyes. "Maybe I was a little scared of you. Maybe I felt that you were too pretty, too nice to ever like someone like me." He chuckles a little. She feels the stone ledge vibrate. "God, I sound so desperate. I sound like my brother used to when he got sentimental."

She feels him shift his gaze to the outside, feels his warm breath that had rested on her lips move to her cheek.

It's too abrupt, too out of the blue when he says suddenly, "I love you. I loved you from the minute I saw you on this ledge from the outside. You were sleeping, just like now. I thought you looked beautiful."

She can't help but feel a bit like one of those princesses from the old fairy tales—Sleeping Beauty, her name was—when he takes her hand in his good one and squeezes it gently. His breathing sounds just a little ragged, but she doesn't dare to open her eyes just yet.

"I don't even know if you'll forgive me. I don't even know if you love me, too."

It's after a few more moments that she allows herself to open her eyes slowly and deliberately. She watches him look up, startled, his golden eyes wide and surprised.

She reaches out with the hand he isn't holding and brushes back a few golden locks of hair.

"I forgive you," she says softly. "I love you, too. I missed you."

She sees a few tears break free of his will and race down his face in moist tracks.

She smiles and leans her forehead against his.

"My name," she says before leaning in, "Is Lenalee."


End file.
